Franklin Antill prepared for his death much more skillfully than he had lived his life. At 36, the shaved-headed, raccoon-eyed Everett laborer already had convictions for kidnapping, assault on a police officer, and burglary. On this day, July 3, 2009, he was in the 1,700-bed downtown King County jail for the knifepoint rape of a Wallingford mother, having been arrested soon after he had attempted to use her credit card at a Lynnwood Walmart.
Brian Stauffer
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With his already lengthy record, Antill was facing a possible life sentence, and wasn't exactly winning any hearts during his ongoing rape trial. Acting as his own attorney, he had aggressively grilled the mother on the witness stand, trying to get her to admit he was some sort of "love doctor" with whom she'd had an affair. That was untrue, she said; she'd never met Antill before the October 2008 assault. In a few days, it would be Antill's turn on the stand. Prosecutors would have the opportunity to grill him in return.
Instead, Antill was about to use the evidence against him to help kill himself off. Literally. As a pro se attorney, he was allowed under state law to store charging papers, witnesses' statements, and other documents needed to prepare his defense in his cell. Sometime after midnight, he began moving the boxes around.
He tore up some of them and wedged the cardboard pieces under his cell door, along the rail it slides on. Then he fashioned a makeshift doorstop device, rolling up paper, cardboard, and bedsheets into a solid wad to prevent the door from opening. He ripped his sheet into strips, made a noose, and threaded it through an overhead light fixture he had partially pried from the ceiling. Then he tied the noose around his neck and stepped off his bunk into eternity.
Around 2:30 on the morning before Independence Day, corrections officer Daryl Harris, making his hourly security check, walked past Antill's cell on the 11th floor of the quarter-century-old jail and saw the inmate hanging motionlessly from the fixture. When Harris tried to open the door from a control panel, the door jammed. Officers flooded the scene. They used a T-bar to pry at the door, and employed a rescue knife on the locking mechanism. After several minutes, they had moved the door enough to squeeze in and begin lifesaving efforts. Fire Department medics arrived within 10 minutes, worked on Antill five more minutes, then declared him dead.
There was little doubt it was suicide, as the medical examiner later officially ruled. And thanks to Antill's fortification of his cell door, he delayed rescue attempts by almost five minutes. According to jail records, Antill had told a jail nurse the previous year that he'd considered suicide in the past, but not since; thus he wasn't on suicide watch.
Still—ripping up a sheet and hanging oneself? The jail won't say exactly how he was able to work the noose through the overhead light fixture. But that sounds like a golden oldie, something out of a 1940s prison movie, and it occurred in a jail that just six months earlier had been put under federal oversight to prevent such deaths.
Only now is that threat being fixed, the county says. "The department is working on reducing the risk of self-harm by grouting the light fixtures attached to the cell ceiling," says jail spokesperson Maj. William Hayes. "The grouting helps close up the very small gap between the light fixture and the ceiling," Hayes says, adding that the project has already been completed in the jail's "psych areas," where mentally ill prisoners are housed.
Under a 2009 legal agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), the county is required to improve operations at the jail—a cluster of blocky mid-rise towers just west of I-5, across from Seattle City Hall. Certain standards at the downtown lockup must be met during a three-year federal monitoring program established under an agreement with the DOJ. Failure could mean further court action, such as monetary penalties against the already cash-strapped county.
The deal evolved from a 2007 DOJ investigation that found jail safety and health conditions so substandard that they constituted violations of inmate civil rights. Along with "preventable" deaths, probers found that inmate abuse was "routine" and jail operations had "serious" deficiencies—some of them taking place right before investigators' eyes. An inmate on suicide watch somehow obtained and swallowed multiple medications while DOJ officials were on the same floor. They watched as security staff failed to call for medical help for a crucial eight minutes. It took another seven minutes before a nurse arrived with a medical crash cart, and 25 minutes after the suicide attempt for fire department medics to arrive. Though the inmate survived, the DOJ called it a "life-threatening example" of the jail's failure, leaving inmates at "grave risk of harm."
The county's smaller, 1,300-bed jail at the newer Maleng Regional Justice Center in Kent has been running more smoothly.
The DOJ said it began its probe in the wake of news reports, citing KING-TV reports on an outbreak of MRSA, the sometimes-life-threatening bacteria that plagues jails and prisons, and Seattle Weekly stories from 2005–2007 on preventable suicides and medical errors. The DOJ said there were at least five preventable deaths at the jail during those years, even though the jail population was dropping. Among them was a hapless gas-station robber named Ronald Hicks, 43, who ran out of gas during his getaway. He was so despondent about his mostly small-time crimes that he once asked a court to kill him ("Hook me up to something and let me go. Don't make me wait to die"). He did the deed himself, hoarding his prescribed jail sedatives until he had enough for a fatal overdose.
